MoMA to Stage De Kooning Retrospective

Curators researching works for the upcoming Willem de Kooning retrospective at New York's museum of Modern Art (MoMA) found a wealth of new discoveries about the work of this pivotal postwar American artist.

The resulting exhibition, which opens sunday, includes about 200 works made over nearly seven decades — paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures — and occupies the museum’s entire 17,000-square-foot sixth floor. It is also the first comprehensive look at de Kooning’s work in nearly 30 years.

“He’s someone whose art is hard to get your hands around,” said exhibition organizer John Elderfield, MoMA’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, in the New York Times. “He was always changing. When his colleagues — Pollock, Newman and Rothko — found a signature style, they stuck with it. When de Kooning found his signature style, he would abandon it and struggle to discover the next one.”